


what do purple sparks mean?

by orphan_account



Category: Carmilla (Web Series)
Genre: F/F, Harry Potter AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-07
Updated: 2015-02-07
Packaged: 2018-03-10 23:02:30
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,052
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3306605
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>HP AU, in which the new Potions Professor makes everyone anxious and there's something creeping in the Owlery that only Laura seems to be curious about.</p>
            </blockquote>





	what do purple sparks mean?

“Have you seen the new Potions professor? She looks like she hasn’t had any sun in twenty years!”

“I hear she gets her post delivered by a colony of bats.”

“I’d bet a whole Galleon that she’s a real vampire.”

“Vampires aren’t allowed at Hogwarts, don’t say that kinda stuff, it’s way too creepy”

Laura actually didn’t hear anything about a new Potions professor until almost a week back at school, and even then it was only in overheard bits and pieces of information that she wasn’t sure she could believe. Nevertheless, the new drama caught her attention and held in a vice-like grip and, even though she had dropped potions the prior year, she found herself practising her lurking.

“This is stupid.” Danny clearly didn’t have the same ideas, and dead eyed Laura and LaFontaine the moment the dynamic duo tried to get her on board as back up. Only one in their group had kept up the class (LaFontaine had always excelled in Potions - they were top of the class since  _first year_ ), and the idea of one of her closest friends left alone with the scary maybe vampire had Laura up in arms and recruiting for her army.

“C’mon, Danny,” she threw on her best begging eyes and stared up, feeling her eyes strain just a little. “It’ll be fun! We can cut some classes and creep around the dungeons… it’s like a project.”

“It’s dangerous.” Danny folded her long arms over her chest and straightened to her full height. LaFontaine slid down to sit in one of the armchairs that rounded the fireplace, feeling a little defeated, but Laura was stubborn, and they knew she  _couldn’t_  be defeated. Danny was too easy to manipulate when it came to the tiny little Gryffindor. “I’m not letting you put yourself in danger to prove some idiots’ rumours are true.”

Laura grinned. “Aha! But you think there’s danger there, you think it’s true!”

Danny scoffed, but didn’t retaliate for a moment too long, instead just breaking eye contact and drawing a breath. In the pause, Laura’s smile only grew, to almost super-villain proportions. “I mean… dangerous as in getting caught. You could get into real trouble snooping around like that, and cutting class.” She shifted a little, the heat of the fire at her back and Laura’s begging face beginning to trap her between a rock and a hard place. “Besides… they wouldn’t hire a vampire here. This is madness.”

“I agree.” While all this had gone on, Perry had made herself comfortable on the side of the armchair LaFontaine had claimed as their own, and gleaned information slowly. “This is foolish. And I’m assuming garlic is used in  _some_  Potions, right?”

“Actually no…” LaFontaine said, a gleam in their eye that made Laura excited enough to break her Danny-stare and glance over. “But it could be.”

Perry sighed. “You’re going to be arrested.”

xxxxxxxxxxxx

As it turned out, all the garlic did for Professor Dean was to make her a little bit more irritable (a feat thought impossible beforehand) and get LaFontaine thrown out of class when the Potion they had been working on exploded due to ‘lack of concentration applied by the student in question’.  Still, the group had marked it as a job well done for now, and Danny and Perry were working hard to keep that tag firmly in place.

Laura was too tightly wound to sleep that night, and as the hours ticked by and one by one her friends all began to drop off to sleep, she remained awake and skittish. So she got up again, grabbing her quill and a parchment as she went and found herself making her way up the tower were she knew her family owl would still be sleeping.

To be a little more clear, her family owl was hers alone, since her father seemed to have no magical background and her mother had left before she was old enough to even remember her, so she didn’t know about her either, and so had no owl to inherit. Her father had no idea if she had been a witch or not. It didn’t stop some of the purebloods from making fun of her, but Laura didn’t mind not knowing. She used to, but it didn’t affect her so much anymore. She bought her own owl and cauldron and went to Hogwarts without knowing what was in front of her, and she was better for it, in her own opinion.

Still, she wished she could have brought her phone. This owl business could be slow at the best of times.

It was freezing up in the tower, and Laura had to hop carefully around the floor to avoid the piles of owl droppings that littered the floor in spots of brown and white. She made a face at the hordes of bored looking birds as she passed, looking for her own little barn owl in among the dozens of similar breeds and colours. “Cookie?” Laura whisper shouted, her hands flexing around the little scrap of a letter she wrote while still down in the Common Room. “Come here, it’s cold. c’mon…”

Laura whined and pouted but there was no answering flap of wings that told her that her beloved only form of communication was even there, and she sighed. “Really?” she muttered, carefully learning against a fairly clean patch of wall. She didn’t want to go back to bed yet. “That’s okay,” Laura smiled up at the thousands of yellow eyes that scared back. “I can wait for you. I can wait all night.”

The owls didn’t reply, of course, and Laura closed her eyes to wait them out. Cookie needed to hunt at night, she should have remembered, but it was nice up here. She liked the company of the quiet little birds every so often.

As if on cue, some idiot’s giant monstrosity of an eagle owl screeched and Laura jumped a foot in the air, accidentally pushing herself off the wall and, after slipping on a patch of white, was left scrabbling to find her footing way to close to the edge for comfort.

Her heart leapt in her chest and in those few seconds, she looked down at the fall below her, eyes scanning for anyone who could help, but seeing none.

Laura assumed later that she must have screamed, because she felt a pair of arms wrap around her before she could fall and throw her back into the room with a giant’s strength and a speed she could never comprehend. Laura landed on her back with a heavy weight on her chest and instantly opened her eyes to see her saviour, her lungs fighting for the air she needed, which had vanished along with the stranger.  

But by the time her vision was returned to her, she was alone in the Owlery, and the rest of the birds had scattered.

xxxxxxxxxxxx

“I swear there was someone up there with me. I felt myself falling but they caught me!”

Perry’s eyebrows knitted together in a genuine show of pity, but Danny’s lip just slid apart with shocked confusion. “But no one was up there with you?”

“Yes! That’s the weird part.” Laura smiled, but it melted quickly away when the two redheads shared a quick glance. “What?”

“Are you sure this wasn’t a dream?” Perry finally sat down beside her, placing a worried hand on her arm. “Because it seems a lot like a dream, and there’s no  _proof_  you got up, even your boots are clean…”

“Because I didn’t want to track bird poo in through the door, that doesn’t mean I wasn’t there.” Laura narrowed her eyes. “Danny, you believe me right?”

Danny swallowed. She and Laura had been in a weird place with each other forever, even with the year difference between them, and Laura had learned how to push her buttons pretty early into their relationship. “I don’t know, Laura… it does seem sorta… made up.”

Laura shook her head. “Fine, since you’re all so sure, I’ll prove it. Myself.” She turned back to her Runes essay with a shrug and a pout. Behind her, she could hear the others go back to their own schoolwork, and LaFontaine show up with a bad attitude and a new assignment that seemed like a hell devised plainly in punishment. Seems that Prof Dean wasn’t too fond of Gryffindors as a whole, even less so when they gave her reasons to pick on them.

Laura tried her best to ignore them anyway. She was too busy with her own ideas. She was going to prove them wrong. There was something up there and she could make them see it, even if she had to stay up there all night.

xxxxxxxxxxxx

Sneaking out at night got easier as the years went by and the nostalgia that came with doing just that with Danny and LaFontaine since second year was only just getting to her when she finished climbing the stairs that would lead her up to the very freezing,  _very_  open plan Owlery once again.

Cookie was there this time, and chirped a greeting before ruffling his feathers, a clear flip off for any work she wanted done. Laura smiled, ducking down and sneaking into the room as if her presence hadn’t already been given away by her betrayer of an owl. “Shhh,” she hissed in his direction, and he closed his eyes, ignoring her.

The Owlery was, admittedly, very small, and the chances of there being another person there that she could not see was slim if not non-existent, but still, Laura’s natural enthusiasm led her to wander the room for a grand total of thirty seconds before giving in and accepting defeat.

She fed Cookie some treats from her pocket and left without another word, disappointed.

xxxxxxxxxxxx

Thankfully, the gang didn’t bring it up again. They had learned to take silence as failure a long time ago, and Laura’s sombre attitude at the table didn’t go unnoticed by Danny.

“Hey, you okay?”

She didn’t want to push, but seeing Laura sad was always weird for everyone, and she always worked to rectify it when she could. The weird radiated too strongly for her liking. Even over at the Hufflepuff table, LaFontaine and Perry were beginning to notice and grow concerned. Kirsch looked like he wanted to approach was holding back, just barely.  

Laura shrugged, sighed, and grabbed some toast, buttering it almost violently on her plate. “I don’t know, I guess I just wanted to clear it all up. And I still don’t know who grabbed me and that just feels weird, you know?”

Danny nodded, her eyebrows creased and concerned. She was never very good at cheering Laura up when she was like this, never mind when she had kind of helped to drive her to it. “Yeah, but-“

“Please don’t tell me I made it up,” Laura said, glancing up from her breakfast to fix her stare on Danny. “It’s kind of repetitive by now.”

Danny slumped a little in her seat, but let the conversation draw to a close, instead spurring life into Laura’s bored self by launching into a rant about the last Quidditch game Laura had reviewed in hopes of picking her up again.

She actually kind of succeeded.

xxxxxxxxxxxx

Laura’s father had always been overprotective of her, and when he realised that he was going to lose for a majority was the school year, he weighed her down with more armour and legal weaponry than one of those characters in those games he never let her play.

It seemed stupid for a witch, practising magic for almost six years, to still keep bear spray under her bed but the habit had stuck with her, and knocking it now seemed daunting and pointless. However, even after so long in this world, learning to reach for a wand before a phone, Laura still found herself reaching down and grasp the cold can between shaking fingers when she woke to the sound of banging fists on glass.

Realistically, it sounded more like incessant tapping, but while still trapped between a nightmare and reality, Laura was ready to empty the entire can in the vague direction of the sound before she paused to assess herself.

The tapping continued, and while her eyes adjusted, Laura drew the can up to her chest, ripping the lid off as a precaution. She also reached with her other hand for her wand, the Lumos spell on her lips while she slipped from the sheets.

Danny groaned in her sleep, stretching out her long limbs to find a more comfortable position to lie in, and for a moment the tapping stopped. Laura followed the lead, her breath caught in her throat until Danny fell back into her normal passed out level of sleep and the sound began again. Little scrapes of sound that drew her towards the window like she was being pulled in by an invisible crank that just refused to let up.

The wind was  _freezing_  and the chill crept up into her bones the moment the window was opened. Laura quickly shut it, looking over her shoulder at the other girls in the room, but it seemed as if they hadn’t so much as felt a draft, and while the relief rushed through her (along with maybe some remains of her sanity returning) she was about to close the window when it was torn from her grasp and swing inside seemingly of its own accord, almost smacking her in the face on its way in. Laura braced herself for the gust of cold air, but it never hit. Instead, when she opened her eyes she was bombarded by blackness.

Not really, but there was a figure dress entirely in black hovering outside the tiny window, blocking the wind with their body, which was shrouded in enough black to intimidate the night sky. Laura took a few started steps back, her grip on her wand tightening again until her knuckles turned white. Still, there wasn’t a sound from the other girls.

She thought about screaming and waking them, and was halfway to opening her mouth, when the figure disappeared in a puff of smoke, leaving the window closed and only the faintest memory that it was ever even open behind.

Laura straightened, noticing now how she had lowered herself like she was going to full of wrestle with the stranger, and let out a slow breath, like one coming out of a nightmare would, spinning on her heel only to come face to face with a girl she didn’t know leaning against her bedpost, arms crossed and messy, windblown hair everywhere.

This time she got a lot closer to screaming, with her eyes widening to the size of gold balls and her hands flailing as she forgot almost every offensive spell she had ever learned was useful in close proximity (except the beer spouting spell that Kirsch has manufactured last year while tinkering with Aguamenti; he was actually kind of a genius for working it out but she didn’t trust that it would be a great defence against someone who teleported smoother than the Death Eaters she read about in class). The newcomer, a girl about her own age, if maybe a little older, raised her hands in surrender.

“Watch where you point that thing, Bloodpop, I’m a friend.”

Laura felt her arm quiver but held firm. “Can you prove it? Because I was kind of taught not to trust strangers, and you look pretty untrustworthy, sorry.”

The dark haired girl only offered up a tight lipped smile and a shake of her head in response to Laura’s concern, but dropped it after barely a second, reaching up with a slender hand to fix her bangs as best she could without a reflection. She heaved a sigh, but brought it back down to extend it to Laura.

Laura jumped a little at the movement, and begged to the universe that it had gone unnoticed. The hope was dashed when she stopped the smirk growing on her companion’s face, even half masked by her hair as she held her gaze down at Laura’s feet.

“I’m Carmilla.”

“Laura.” Laura said, half in instinct, half in shock.

“I know… kind of here to help you. I know who you are. Just lower the wand and let me talk.”

Laura narrowed her eyes at the other girl, taking her in in her best attempt at looking intimidating while at the same time testing her reliability. Carmilla, now that she got a better look at her, couldn’t have been older than eighteen or nineteen but held herself well enough to pass for older (something Laura could  _never_  pull off. If anything it made her seem younger after all the effort). Her face was half shielded still by her wavy, dark hair, but Laura could spot some of her  _very_  defined features through the strands and felt a twist in her gut that she immediately shifted into the ‘jealousy’ potion of her brain to sort through at a time when she life might not be at risk.

Carmilla quirked her eyebrow and opened her mouth as if to speak again, when Danny squirmed again, mumbling something about Chocolate Frogs and Kirsch, and Laura tore her eyes away from Carmilla to glance in her direction just long enough to felt the cold chill of terror creep up through her stomach and into her chest before she finally got her eyes to focus back on her maybe-attacker. Carmilla hadn’t budged any more than folding her arms impatiently over her chest, and even then Laura wondered how she pulled off the move so quick before brushing it off.

It wasn’t the time for investigative journalism.

Laura drew in a slow breath, and locked eyes again with a somehow even more bored looking Carmilla. “What do you want?”

“To help?” Carmilla’s eyes narrowed, frustration building up.

“I don’t need help.”

Carmilla smiled, her teeth gleaming in the moonlight and suddenly Laura felt her curiosity strike another rough cord. “Maybe not you specially, but you were the first of your little group of imbeciles to open to window to me, so… I guess I’m speaking through you?”

Laura lowered her wand a little, taken aback. “What?”

Carmilla unfolded her arms. “Your little ginger friend is drawing attention.”

“I have more than one-“

“Potions, pumpkin pie, the one doing Potions. They’re drawing attention and it’s going to get them hurt.”

Laura felt her body tense in panic but Carmilla just eyed her right hand again. “I swear you’re getting no more words until that’s gone,” she gestured to the wand, which was now spitting out purple sparks at an alarming rate, with a pointed stare. “Really doesn’t stimulate the generous side of a person.”

Laura hadn’t even noticed she was still holding it so tightly, pouring so much anxiety into it that the magic it produced almost felt like the accidental version she produced as a child, and lowered it on command. “LaFontaine?”

“Sure.” Carmilla shrugged.

Laura felt cold. “What’s happened?”

“See, this is much more civil. A much nicer environment for everybody. Except you.” Carmilla drawled while Laura sat down on the edge of her bed, her legs weak, but keeping her warn close to her hip, just in case. She still didn’t trust Carmilla.

“Please just tell me what you came here too.”

Carmilla waited a beat, steeling herself for a moment. “The Professor really is a vampire, they were right, but your friends been butting into her affairs too much for her to stay quiet about it for much longer, and from what I’ve seen it’s coming to a head pretty soon… and I kind of didn’t want that happening.” She seemed sheepish for a second before recovering, but Laura felt her lips quirk at the change in demeanour. “Mostly because I don’t want to move again though.”  _So much for lip quirks._

“You know the Potions Professor?”

“She’s my mom.”

Just like that it all began to click. The gleaming teeth, and teleportation…  _bloodpop_. Suddenly Laura was on her feet again, wand in hard (shooting blue sparks that she’d never done before) and a yell on her lips when Carmilla began to smoke up again. “Wait!” Laura winced when the cry came out a little too high pitched, but it seemed like none of her roommate even heard a whisper.

“What?” Carmilla reformed for a moment, sporting striking yellow eyes against skin so pale and a floating aura so black that Laura didn’t know what to think.

“What do I do? You can’t just drop all this on me!” Laura blinked, a lot, and Carmilla shook her head, confused. She fought to hold back her smile at the whispers though.

“Look I did my good deed for the year, work out the rest yourself, sweetheart.” She began her smoking act again but Laura was faster, reaching out to grab her arm, hard.

“No, you can’t just tell me one of my Professors isn’t what I thought she was and disappear! Who does that?” She was whisper shouting now, and she knew in the back of her mind that she had maybe five minutes before Danny shot up, ready to battle the forces of evil in her PJs, but she wasn’t about to stop when she was holding onto a  _vampire_  (which was the opposite of every single lesson life ever taught her but she wasn’t about to stop now) and demanding answers. “You came to me over this.”

“My last choice… it all makes sense now.” Carmilla glared down (barely) at her, but it was weak and broke in barely a few seconds, and Laura felt like something should have clicked in her head but she just couldn’t grasp onto it enough to sort through it. “Just… stop bothering my mother. Easy. And let go of my arm.”

Laura loosened her hold just long enough for Carmilla to pull away, and slumped back onto her bed, glancing at the clock. 5am, the sun would be up soon. Would sun affect Carmilla? It didn’t seem to bother her mother much, and Laura had definitely seen her at enough school events to know that. But maybe it was different vampire to vampire, what did she know? They never covered vampires in class.

Or maybe she was just sick that day.

Either way, she didn’t know if their argument time was limited or not. Carmilla hadn’t puffed off though, so that was good.

“Can we kill her?”

“No. Of course not.” Carmilla found that way too funny for Laura not to frown at her. “Just avoid her. Tell your friend to stop pissing her off and nothing will happen. End of story. Can I leave?”

Laura sighed again, rubbing her eyes. There was no way in hell she was getting back to sleep after this. No one could sleep after this. Except for, maybe, anyone in the coven (or whatever of vampires was called) of  _freaking vampires_  living on the grounds.

After a moment, Laura finally glanced up, only to find a black mist in the place Carmilla had stood, evidently just something she left behind because she could, and found the urge to groan.

“Stupid vampire,” she muttered, lying back down on the bed and hoping the lingering wisps of black air would fade before the girls woke up. Two hours was a reasonable enough about of time to expect that, right?

Laura rolled over so that she was facing the window, watching carefully for any signs of life, or undeath. At least there were good vampires as well as evil vampires, and that was good. She had back up in a major way if Carmilla every decided to care again. It was comforting. Kinda. If she even wanted Carmilla’s help anymore, which she  _didn’t_.

She shook away the idea, thoughts drifting to the morning. Telling LaFontaine, of all people to reel back their curiosity was going to be bordering on impossible. They were almost worse than her in that way. And she had a huge Care of Magical Creatures test in the evening to cap it off.

Yeah, tomorrow was going to be rough.


End file.
